Page 56 of Lessons in Forgiving
To make up for the fact that it wasn’t going great, and he was most likely the reason for it, I snickered. “Ask me again once you start doing something worth writing about.”
Henry grabbed his water bottle with an unapologetic laugh, then stifled the sound when he took a big sip.
I tried not to watch his Adam’s apple bob.
When he took the bottle from his lips, he looked back up at me, head shaking. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Am I boring you, Miss Castillo?”
“Terribly,” I whined, though diverted my attention onto the screen again.
I watched my cursor blink. Because I wasn’t quite sure how to sayHenry Parker Pressley looked so handsome when he played soccer, and word it in a way that didn’t get me banned from every news house in the States.
“You’re pretending to work again,” Henry noted in amusement, and behind my screen, I grimaced at the accuracy. “Come here,” he chirped, looking up at me with raised brows. He held his hand out.
For me to take, presumably.
“What?” My eyes flicked to my screen again. “Why?” I wasn’t ready to give up on my document’s word-count goal just yet.
“Just come here, Paula.”
“What for?”
Despite the annoyed tone in his voice, his lips spread into a wide grin. Exasperated and amused and beautiful.
“Don’t make me come up there,” he threatened. “I’m sweaty and gross.”
I doubted it.
Still, I closed my laptop slowly, the gesture a small win for him in itself. “Tell me why,” I said, standing up.
“Do you trust me?”
“No.”
I slipped under the railing and the few feet to the ground regardless. Not taking my eyes off him, I narrowed them in suspicion when he grabbed one of the soccer balls sitting on the sideline. Dread formed low in my belly when we walked to the penalty spot.
“Kick it.”
My head shot in his direction. “What?”
“If watching me is too boring,” he said in a sing-song voice, “you might as well do it yourself.”
I shook my head so quickly, the stadium around me blurred for a moment. “Absolutely not.”
Look, obviously I’d kicked a ball before. Although soccer wasn’t at the top of the Dominican Republic’s favorite sports list, it was still popular enough. And with Dad forcing me to learn how to dribble when I was seven—only to give up on the endeavor a month later because I’d been a hopeless case—it had been impossible to avoid scoring a goal here and there.
But that didn’t mean I had to put that particularuntouchedskillset to the test now. In a twenty-five-thousand-seat stadium. With one of soccer’s most anticipated only a few feet away.
“Paula,” that same man whined from beside me now, nudging the ball right to my feet. “Come on. What do you have to lose?”
My pride and humility, among other things.
He interpreted my eyes narrowing as anI’ll do it. It was obvious by the way his lips twitched, and he took a few steps back to give me space. Then, he strayed his arms in the direction of the goal and said, “All yours.”
So… I lined up the shot, tried my best to get the angle right, and went for it. No time for overthinking.
I wished I could say there’d been too much force in my kick. That I hadn’t angled my foot right and it was the reason the ball flew so sideways, it would be an annoyance to get back.
Unfortunately, the ball hadn’t even made it into the vicinity of the net. It stopped a good ten feet short, slowly rolling until it ran out of momentum.
